CHAPTER III.THE GLENDARES.
Twelve Irish miles from Kingslough, meaning fifteen or thereabouts English measurement, stood Rosemont, the ancestral residence of the Earls of Glendare.
That fifteen miles’ journey took the traveller precisely the same distance from the sea; but it did not matter in the smallest degree to any of the Glendares where the family seat was situated, since they never lived on their own acres whilst a guinea remained to be spent in London or Paris.
Once upon a time, as the fairy-books say, the Glendare rent-roll had provided the headof the family with an income of one thousand pounds a day. There were larger rent-rolls in the United Kingdom no doubt, but still a thousand a day can scarcely be considered penury.
To the Glendares, however, it merely assumed the shape of pocket-money; as a natural consequence the ancestral revenues proved ultimately totally inadequate to supply the requirements of each successive earl.
They married heiresses, they married paupers, with a precisely similar result.
The heiresses’ wealth was spent, the paupers learned to spend. Gamblers, men and women, they risked the happiness and well-being of their tenants on a throw of the dice. Rents, too high already, were raised on lands the holders had no capital to get more produce out of.
“Money! money!” was the Glendare refrain; and money scraped together by pence and shillings, money painfully earned in the sweat of men’s brows, by the labour of women’s hands, went out of the country to keep thosewicked orgies going where my lord, and other lords like him, helped to make a poor land poorer, and milady, all paint, and pride, and sin, played not only diamonds and spades, but the heart’s blood of patient men, and the tears and sobs of hopeless women.
In the quiet fields where the wheat grew and the barley ripened, where the potatoes put forth their blossoms, purple and yellow, white and yellow, where the meadows yielded crops that reached far above a man’s knees, there was the Glendare rent sowed and planted, reaped, mown, garnered, gathered, pound by pound, all too slowly for the harpies who waited its advent.
The hens in the untidy farm-yards, the eggs they laid in convenient hedges, the chickens they hatched were all in due course sacrificed on the altar of rent. The cows’ milk, the butter it produced, the calves they bore, might have been labelled “Rent.” The yarn spun by an ancient grandmother, the cloth woven by a consumptive son had that trade-mark stamped upon thread and web. The bees inthe garden hummed unconsciously the same tune, the pigs grunting on the dung-heap, wallowing in the mire, exploring the tenants’ earth-floored kitchens, repeated the same refrain.
Rent! the children might have been hushed to sleep with a song reciting its requirements, so familiar was the sound and meaning of the word to them. Rent! lovers could not forget the inevitable “gale days,” even in their wooing.
What did it matter whether the tenants looked forth over land where the earth gave her increase, or upon barren swamps, where nothing grew luxuriantly save rushes and yellow flags? The rent had to be made up somehow just the same. Did the pig die, did the cow sicken, did the crops fail, did illness and death cross their thresholds, that rent, more inexorable even than death, had to be paid by men who in the best of times could scarcely gather together sufficient to pay it at all.
In the sweat of their brows was that income made up by the Glendare tenantry, and theJews had the money. Fortunately in those days penny newspapers were not, and tidings from the great capital came rarely to remote homesteads, otherwise how should these men have borne their lot; borne labour greater than any working man of the present day would endure, and superadded to that labour all the anxieties of a merchant? The farmer then was a principal and yet he did his own labour. He had a principal’s stake, a principal’s responsibilities, and as a recompense—what? The privilege of being out in all weathers to look after his stock and his crops; the right to work early and late so long as he could make up his rent; the power to keep a sound roof over his head if he saw to the thatch or the slating himself. Add to these advantages a diet into which oaten meal entered largely and meat never; the luxury of a chaff-bed; the delight of being called Mister by the clergyman, the minister, the agent, and friends generally, and the reader will have a fair idea of the sort of existence led by tenants on the Glendare and other estates at that period of Ireland’s history.
Landlords in those days had no responsibilities. Responsibility was at that time entirely a tenant question, which fact may perhaps account for some of the troubles that have since then perplexed the mind of the upper ten. By the grace of God and the king there was then a class established to spend money; by grace of the same powers there was a still larger class created to provide the money the former chose to squander.
That property had its duties as well as its rights was a maxim which would have been laughed to scorn by those whom the adage concerned.
Once again we may find in this, cause for the later effect, of the lower classes now utterly denying that property has its rights as well as its duties.
Revolutions come and revolutions go; there is a mighty one being wrought at the present moment, which has arisen out of circumstances such as those enumerated and others like them, and happy will this land be if for once the wealthy can persuade themselves to personalabnegation as the poor did in days gone by.
It is hard to do so with the eyes of body and understanding wide open, but in proportion to the difficulty so will be the reward.
The great must give much now for the years wherein their fathers gave nothing; and if they are willing to do so, the evil will right itself, and a bloodless battle-ground shall leave an open field whereon the next generation may ventilate the differences of centuries, and settle those grievances which have been handed down from generation to generation, but investigated truthfully and thoroughly by none.
In the days of which I write, taking society round, the rich were all powerful, and the poor had none to help. It was a great and patient population that rose up early and worked hard all day, that ate the bread of carefulness and saved every groat which their poor lives could spare in order that milady and other ladies like her should fulfil no one single useful or grand purpose in life.
Were the sights of nature in her differentmoods sufficient reward for their uncomplaining labour? So perhaps the men and the women who never noticed nature at all, considered.
And yet there must have been some great compensation about the whole business, which perhaps we shall never quite understand here—unless it was to be found in the great contentment, the sweet patient adaptability of the people of that far away time.
The love of wife and children was wonderfully dear to those toilers on the land, and as a rule they had tender, helpful wives, and dutiful, hard working children. There was peace at home, let the agent be never so unquiet; there was no straining this way and struggling in that direction.
The oaten meal porridge was eaten in thankfulness, and no dissension curdled the milk with which the mess was diluted. They were too poor, and too dependent one upon another to quarrel, added to which the Almighty had bestowed upon them that power of knowing when to speak and when to refrain, whichadds so mightily to the well-being of households.
“The world,” says the old adage, “grows wiser and weaker;” comparing the poor of these days with the poor of a long ago period, it is to be feared they do not grow better.
Concerning the rich, it is to be hoped they grow wiser than their progenitors.
Wickeder it might baffle some even of the men whose doings now astonish worthy magistrates and learned judges, to become.
No man of the present day at all events dare emulate the doings of those historical Glendares, and yet one redeeming point may be stated in their favour. They exhibited their vices where they spent their money. On the rare occasions when they honoured the family mansion with their presence, they left their immoralities behind them. They came like leeches to suck the life’s blood out of their tenants; to assert feudal superiority in the matter of votes; to get out of the way of importunate creditors; sometimes it might be to recruit health, enfeebled by London hoursand London dissipation: but no tenant ever had cause to curse the day when his daughter’s pretty face was commented on by one of the Glendares, old or young; no farmer’s wife ever had reason to weep for a child worse than dead through them; no household held a vacant place in consequence of any ill wrought by my lord or one belonging to him.
Indeed that was just the sort of evil my lord would not have brooked on the part of one belonging to him.
He knew the people he had to deal with, and understood precisely the straw which should break the camel’s back of their endurance.
So to put it, he and his were on their good behaviour when they crossed the channel; and accordingly, though never worse landlords cursed a soil than these men who had come in with the second Charles, and not gone out with any of the Georges, the Glendares were popular and well liked.
Perhaps for the same reason that the Stuarts were liked. They had winsome faces, gracious ways, familiar manners. The beggars in thestreets had free liberty to bandy repartee with my lord, who always kept his pockets full of coppers for their benefit.
Coppers! the pence were much to them, but what were they to him? And yet the farmer, from whose leathern pouches those coppers originally came, and who gave out of their poverty a million times more than their landlord out of his abundance, liked to hear the mendicants’ praise of my lord, who had a word and a joke for everybody, “God bless him.”
And perhaps there was some praise due to a nobleman who, situated as my lord was, had a word and a joke for anybody.
It is not in the slightest degree likely that a single reader of these lines can know from experience the irritating effects which a persistent dun is capable of exciting on the serenest temper. Still less can the present race of debtors understand the horror that encompassed even a nobleman when he knew at any moment the hand of a bailiff might be laid on his shoulder.
Fancy capping jests under these circumstances with a bare-footed, imperfectly clothed Hibernian beggar who had never washed her body nor combed her hair for forty years or thereabouts. Could you have done it? No, you answer with a shudder; and yet that was the way in which gentry courted popularity, and “made their souls” in the good old days departed.
To the poorest man who touched his hat to him, my lord raised his; let the humblest Irish equivalent of John Oakes or Tom Styles ask audience, he was asked into the presence-chamber. On his agent, on his lawyers, my lord thrust the unpleasant portion of the land question, and every tenant on that wide estate was from his own personal experience firmly convinced that if his landlord could only be privately informed how wrong many things were, he would publicly redress them.
“Not but what the lawyers and the agent were very pleasant gentlemen, only it was not natural they should take the same interest in the soil as his lordship,” and so forth. Whereasthose unhappy gentlemen were always trying to moderate his lordship’s demands, always striving to make that most worthy nobleman understand there was a limit to a farmer’s purse, a point beyond which a man could not, physically or pecuniarily, be safely bled.
Besides Rosemont the Glendare owned other residences in Ireland: Glendare Castle, a black ruin, the foundations of which were washed by the wild Atlantic waves; Beechwood, a lovely property occupied by a certain Major Coombes, who kept the place in good order to the exceeding mortification of his landlord, who considered the well-kept lawns and trim flower-gardens and richly stocked conservatories a tacit reproach to himself; to say nothing of several dilapidated shooting-lodges that were either rented by poor gentlemen farmers, or else going to ruin as fast as damp and neglect could take them.
Had any one of the family set himself to the task of freeing the estates, he might have succeeded. Had any fresh earl when he returned to Rosemont, after laying the body of his predecessorin the old Abbey overlooking the sea, faced the question of his difficulties, and determined to rid his property of debt and the Jews, he might even at the eleventh hour have saved those broad acres for his posterity and won ease of mind and blessings from his inferiors for himself. Until the very last, the disease though deep seated was not incurable; but not one of those careless earls ever had courage to endure the remedy.
After the funeral of each successive nobleman, the next heir hied him back to London, or Paris, or Baden, or some other favourite resort; and the Jews and the lawyers and the middle-men prospered and fattened on the Glendare pastures, whilst both landlord and tenants led wretched, anxious lives, the first driven almost mad by the harpies, whose cry from January to December was “More, more,” the latter toiling to fill a purse out of which the money poured faster than it could be thrown in.
Yes, they were doomed in those days of which I write—the Glendares gracious inmanner, false at heart; lightly had their lands been won, lightly it seemed destined they should go. And yet there was one of the family towards whom the eyes of the tenantry turned with hope, though he was not heir-apparent, or presumptive, or anything of the sort.
He was resident, however, and that, in the estimation of the Glendare dependents, was a virtue and a promise in itself. Since his earliest youth Robert Somerford had lived amongst his uncle’s tenantry; not from any desire on his part to do so, the reader may be certain, but simply because Mrs. Somerford having no money to live anywhere else, had been glad enough when left a widow, to embrace Lord Glendare’s offer for her to take up her abode at Rosemont, and make her moderate income go as far as she could in one wing of that commodious family mansion.
The Hon. Mrs. Somerford never made even a pretence of being contented with this arrangement. She gave herself airs, she openly stated her dislike to the country and its inhabitants;she never visited the poor, or the rich either if she could help it, for that matter; she never assisted the sick and needy; the ready graceful charity of that generous peasantry she laughed to scorn; indeed, as Mrs. Hartley, herself a distant kinswoman of Lord Glendare’s relative declared, “Mrs. Somerford was a truly detestable person.”
But Lord Glendare had loved his younger brother, her husband, and for the sake of the dead gave shelter to the widow and her son, the latter of whom grew up amongst the Irish people as has been stated.
Had fate so willed it, he would gladly have left Ireland and the people behind him for ever. Aliens the Glendares were when to John Somerford, first Earl, King Charles granted those lands, privileges, and so forth, of which mention has already been made; and aliens they remained through the years that followed. They were not of the soil; better they loved the pavement of Bond Street than all the shamrocks of the sainted isle; but as already hinted, they were a plausible and anadaptable race, possessed of manners that might have pleased their first royal patron, not given to tramp unnecessarily on people’s corns and blessed with that ready courtesy, which if it mean in reality very little, conveys the idea of intending a great deal.
Certain were the tenants that some day Mr. Robert would put matters right for them with my lord.
“He is like one of ourselves, bless his handsome face,” said the women, enthusiastically. “He has sat down there,” and the speaker would point to a settle opposite, “many and many a time, and taken the children on his knee, and rested his gun in the corner, and eaten a potato and salt with as much relish as if it had been a slice off a joint.”
“And his tongue is like ours,” some man would continue. “Even my lord talks English, and so do his sons, fine young gentlemen though they be, but Master Robert is Irish to the backbone. He will go away to Dublin and make a great name for himself one of these days, and then he won’t forget the ‘gossoons’he played with once, but ‘insense’ my lord into the wrongs that are put upon us in his name.”
“There never was a Somerford a patch upon Mr. Robert,” sometimes cried a female voice when the conversation turned upon Rosemont and its inhabitants. At which juncture a tenant more wise, more just, or more prudent than the woman-kind, was certain to interpose with a cautious remark—
“Hoot! ye shouldn’t say that, the young lords are wonderful fine lads to be sure.”
From all of which it will be perceived that another earl now received the Glendare rents from that lamented nobleman who ruled over his vassals at the time George the Fourth began his glorious reign.
He lay in Ballyknock Abbey securely cased in elm and soldered down in lead, and, for greater safety, boxed up a third time in oak; and Louis, the son he hoped might obtain an appointment in the Royal Household, and who did obtain it, reigned in his stead.
Thus a new race was springing up not one whit less extravagant, selfish, short sighted, and evilly inclined than the former generation. Strange tales about the Glendareménage, and the Glendare doings, found their way across the channel to Dublin, and thence down to the better class of houses in the colder and darker north,—tales whereat sometimes society lifted up its hands and covered its face, tales at which it shook its decorous head, tales of shifts and subterfuges at which it was not in Irish nature to avoid laughing.
A volcano was threatening the land, but the Glendares danced unconscious on the edge of the crater. The skeleton ruin was creeping up to their gates, but they only threw those gates open the wider, and bade more guests enter. A cloud of debt, once no bigger than a man’s hand, now covered almost the whole of their social future, and yet, each day, fresh debts were contracted.
The Countess was one of the queens whose voice was potent at Almack’s.
She had been a great beauty in her youth.Artists had painted, sculptors moulded her, poets had written verses in her honour, philosophers had basked in her smiles, statesmen esteemed it an honour to receive a tap from her fan.
But the loveliness was gone, as the lands were going, and everybody knew it.
She had immediately before the period when this story opens, received an intimation from her husband that as an election was imminent, it would be necessary for them both to repair to Ireland; and when she looked in the glass, to trace precisely the change which the years come and gone since she had canvassed for votes before had wrought, she sighed at the alteration made not so much by time as by the harassing life led of her own choice and her own free will.
“Heigho!” she thought, “who would imagine I had once been the beautiful Lady Trevor?” and then she put on a little more rouge, and decided that after all the change was more apparent to her than it could be to any one else.
Happy in this delusion, my lady arrived at Rosemont on the morning of the day when all Kingslough was in consternation at high noon by reason of Nettie O’Hara’s disappearance.